Over two weeks (along with hat making – see my next post) the kids have been working with iron-on transfer dyes, also called disperse dyes. Here you paint onto paper and when it is dry you can iron what you’ve painted onto fabric. This is a great technique to play with as you do not have to simply transfer what you paint, you can cut it up, and mask areas when you are transferring – very much like printing.
The first step is to paint a design, or a flat colour, onto printer paper (it has to be printer paper to work). The colours appear kind of muted but when they are transferred onto the fabric they are very bright, some almost florescent.
The fabric must be synthetic for it to work, the iron must be on its hottest setting and there must be no water in the iron. But then the colours are colourfast, so it’s a perfect technique for adding designs onto clothing or bags. Either use synthetic ones or sew the polyester with the transferred image onto it.
Unfortunately, the ironing takes much longer than I’d thought so we weren’t able to iron on all the pieces the kids made, or experiment that much with cutting and collaging the transfer paintings. But hopefully the kids can continue this at home (with adult supervision).
